Buyer's Guide: 11 Color Inkjet Printers

HP Deskjet 4160

This snazzy looking little printer is surprisingly fast and capable. With page rates of up to 30 ppm for black and white, and 23 ppm for color, it can really crank out the copy, and it's pretty good at printing photos as well. Black print resolution is 1200x1200, and four jets per pixel (cyan, magenta, and yellow, plus black) bring color print resolution up to 4800x1200. This unit can print borderless images up to 8.5" (21.59cm) wide, and up to 24" (60.96cm) long. Its retail price of around $70 explains why the 4160 supports neither direct photo printing nor memory card input.

The 4160 looks pretty harmless, but prints very quickly when it has to.

The built-in photo processing circuitry in the 4160 includes support for HP Adaptive Lighting (to improve brightness and contrast in photos) and HP Auto Red-eye Removal as well. It can handle letter, legal and executive paper sizes, as well as postcards and No. 10 envelopes and borderless photo (4x6", 5x7" and 8x10"), panoramic (4x10", 4x11" and 4x12") prints.

With dimensions of 18.07" x 8.7" x 6.7" (45.90cm x 22.10cm x 17.02cm), the 4160 is relatively compact among the printers in this guide. Its weight of 7.6 pounds (3.48 kg) is on the lighter end of our spectrum as well. The unit works with all modern versions of Windows from 98SE through Vista, and with Mac OS X 10.3.x and 10.4.x versions as well.

Consumables include a black cartridge and a tri-color color cartridge. Both cost around $20 for a single unit, with two packs slightly discounted at $36. A specialty photo cartridge costs around $25. HP also offers a variety of photo printing paper, at prices in line with those reported for the HP Business Inkjet 1200d in the preceding section.

  • lucyrssll
    Stinkyink now offer ink cartridges for the HP Deskjet 9800 ink. Oh and it's free delivery too!
    Reply
  • Hi Tom,

    Do you think you will do an updated review for printer of 2011?

    Thanks, Pete @ Canon Ink Cartridges
    Reply